


It Perches in the Soul

by Snickfic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dreams, Fallen Castiel, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Male-Female Friendship, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-26
Updated: 2012-09-26
Packaged: 2017-11-15 01:45:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jo first met Castiel long before Carthage, and he keeps seeing her long after it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Perches in the Soul

_“So you’re an angel,” says Jo. She doesn’t quite believe Castiel, he can tell, but she doesn’t quite disbelieve him, either._

_“An angel of the Lord,” he agrees._

_“Never met one of those before.”_

\--

The first time Castiel visits Jo, she’s perhaps ten years old. Her hair’s pulled back in a ponytail, but wisps of it fly free anyway. She’s walking down the center of an unpaved street, and she’s wearing wearing gap-kneed blue jeans with a belt canted over one hip. From the belt hangs a knife in a leather sheath. She carries a rifle in her hands.

Castiel arrives ten feet in front of her and a little to her left. She stops, eyes huge, gun immediately pointed at his chest. Her gaze narrows and she lowers the gun. “I remember you.” 

This could be significant, or it could be a child’s dreaming brain at work. “What are you hunting?” Castiel asks.

“How’d you know I’m hunting?”

“Because you have a gun,” Castiel says. Because in one of these empty storefronts, behind one of these windows gaping and jagged with holes lurks some remotely canine thing, blood dripping perpetually from its fangs. Because in the twenty-four hours he knew Jo Harvelle he learned that there was never a time she wasn’t a hunter. 

“It’s a black dog,” Jo confides. “I have to shoot it.”

Castiel nods. “Do you have silver bullets?”

“ ‘Course,” Jo says, full of scorn.

“Do you want me to assist you?”

She considers this a moment. “If you want,” she says finally. Castiel senses that he’s been granted a great favor. He takes his place beside her, and they continue walking down the street.

“What is this place?” he asks.

“Ghost town.”

Castiel recognizes the phrase. Still he asks, “Are there ghosts?”

Jo shrugs. “Maybe later.”

They come to the building marked SALOON in large but faded letters. One of the saloon doors is missing; the other hangs by one hinge. Jo cocks her head with an air of deep attentiveness. Far back in the recesses of the saloon, the black dog snuffles. She motions Castiel behind her and marches towards the door. When they’re ten feet from the entrance, Jo stops. She sticks a hand into the pocket of her jeans and comes up with a sandwich bag. “Open it,” she whispers, “and throw it in the door.”

Castiel opens the bag. Inside is a strip of uncooked bacon. Castiel plucks it out and tosses it into the saloon. They wait five seconds, ten, and then the snuffling approaches. The thing breathes wet, heaving breaths just beyond the reach of daylight. There’s a pause and a kind of slurping – the sound, perhaps, of a monster licking bacon from a dusty wooden floor. Then it growls.

“It’s coming,” Jo whispers. She pulls the butt hard into her shoulder, braces herself, and waits.

The black dog bursts from the doorway, a mass of claws and blood and saliva and filthy black fur. There’s no sense of anatomy to it; it has legs, most but not all of which seem to be oriented generally downward, and teeth, but far too many and too widely distributed to fit into just one mouth. It’s a nightmare, or what would pass for one in most children’s dreams.

Jo takes aim and fires straight into the black dog’s throat. In another setting, the recoil would throw her to the ground, but here she only stumbles back a step, pumps the action to chamber another round, and fires again. The beast stumbles but continues to close the distance between it and them. Jo drops the rifle and draws a knife from the sheath at her belt. It’s a fine-looking knife, and she handles it with evident familiarity, but even in dreams the reach of her arm is shorter than that of the black dog’s teeth.

Even so, there’s no doubt she’ll win. Her triumph is implicit in the golden light, in the wordless, tuneless song on the air. Maybe the black dog recognizes this. Maybe its certain defeat is why it reeks of such malice. 

It leaps, and it lands on Jo, its jaws open and hungry. Instantly she’s buried beneath it with only her fierce cry to prove it hasn’t swallowed her alive.

Thoughtless, Castiel’s sword is in his hand, and he strikes. He shatters bone, punctures organs, but that is all. There is no flash of light, no dissolution of the black dog’s being. The sword is Castiel’s true sword, but the rules here are Jo’s rules, and Jo doesn’t believe in angels.

Yet suddenly the battle is over. The beast is slumped, still, blood pouring from a dozen wounds. A single blond pigtail is flung out from underneath it. Castiel shoves the black dog’s body away, and beneath it is Jo sprawled in the street, filthy with gore but grinning. Her knife is still in her hand, and if Castiel inspected the beast more closely, he knows he’d find it was her blade that delivered the killing blow.

She crawls to her feet. “We did it,” she says, eyes aglow.

One of the many dubious gifts of free will is imagination. Castiel’s is stunted, he suspects, slower to work in him than in the mercurial humans around him. Now, unbidden, it lays out for Castiel a scene in which this pigtailed girl is scattered in pieces in the dusty street. The image cuts him to the bone.

“Hey,” Jo says, more softly now. “We did it.”

Castiel swallows back memories that aren’t even his, memories he heard from Dean in slurred, broken pieces. “Your dress is dirty,” he says.

“Yeah,” Jo says smugly. Still, she wrinkles her nose at the great clot of blood on her shoulder. Disgust turns to dismay when she sees the gaping rips in the side of her shirt. “Can you fix it?”

Why she thinks Castiel has any facility with clothing is beyond him; nothing in his survey of popular cultural understandings of angels suggested it. Jo is looking at him with evident expectation, though.

Castiel touches his fingers to her forehead. He heals all the shallow cuts and bruises, few though they are, and he makes her shirt whole, just as he’s done with Jimmy’s overcoat time and again. Jo opens her eyes and surveys his work. “Cool,” she says. 

\--

Jo is younger this time, maybe seven. The dream is very small: Jo stands on a hillside as a late-evening breeze blows gusts of dry, dusty-sweet air up from the fields around her. The surrounding hills are distant smudges, and within a few feet of Jo, the blades of grass blur into a sea. 

She looks up when Castiel arrives. “Who are you?” she asks. _Who_ , not _What_ ; the years have not yet taught her about the beasts that look like men.

“I’m an angel,” Castiel says.

“Angels have wings.”

“I have wings.”

She eyes him doubtfully. “I can’t see ‘em.”

They are not wings in the strictest sense, not as humans mean the term. They are not composed of flight feathers and down feathers, of skin stretched across a frame of hollow bones. The wings angels are famed for are only bare outlines of the truth, shadows cast in a dimension confined to matter and energy alone. To manifest even those takes terrific power; Castiel once showed them to Dean with barely a thought, but now showing one glimpse of them on earth would deplete Castiel’s remaining grace in a single act.

But he isn’t on earth now. 

Castiel flexes. It’s easy to unfurl them here, effortless. He feels their breadth spanning thousands of feet, sensitive to every natural and supernatural gust, and he sees their muted, silhouetted glory in the widening of Jo’s eyes. After a moment, he relaxes, and they tuck away again into the dimensions visible only to angels.

“Oh,” Jo says. The word is very small and immediately lost to the wind.

“Don’t be afraid,” Castiel says. It’s been millenia since he’s had reason to say those words; the Winchesters never needed them. “I am an angel of the Lord,” he adds. It tastes like a lie. Does it mean nothing, the strength with which he still longs for it to be true? 

Jo doesn’t look much comforted. Still, when Castiel makes no move to smite her or whatever else she imagines angels doing, she fists her hands and asks, “Can you fly?”

“It wouldn’t look like flying to you.”

Apparently fully over her fear of him, Jo huffs. “What good’re wings if you can’t fly? If I had ‘em, I’d fly all the time.”

An idea comes to Castiel. It is frivolous, and suddenly he wants it very much. “Do you dream about flying?” It’s common among humans. Dean mentioned it to him once.

Jo shakes her head.

“I can make you wings,” Castiel says. 

“Really?”

Castiel crouches. “Come here. Turn around.” Wide-eyed, Jo obediently comes and turns her back to him. Castiel lays his hands flat against her shoulderblades. Making wings is not a power angels generally possess, but here it is different. Here, the world bends to belief, and Jo’s is all that matters. Wings unfurl beneath Castiel’s hands like flowers blooming in the sun. They’re a bird’s wings, feathers brown and speckled with white: some bird of prey’s, he recognizes. He stands and draws them outwards with the motion of his hands until they span fifteen feet from tip to tip.

“I’m finished,” he says.

Jo valiantly stands up under their weight. She twists, trying to get a look at them. In her excitement, they flap, and the force of them against the air knocks her to her knees. “Ow,” she says. She scowls up at Castiel. “But what about _flying_?”

“It will take time,” he says. “And practice.”

Jo begins to answer, but a voice sweeps in from across the prairie, calling Jo’s name. Ellen.

“Crap,” Jo says fiercely. “Will you come back later and show me?”

Before Castiel can say he will, the dream is ended. Jo is gone.

\--

At the best of times it is a delicate thing, simultaneously navigating both time and dream. When Castiel finds Jo again, he can’t be certain of when he’s found her, whether this is before or after the last time, whether she will even remember him.

However, when he arrives in the dirt parking lot beyond a weather-worn building, her eyes light with recognition. They quickly dim. “They’re gone,” she tells him. “My wings are gone. I never even got to fly.”

“They’re only hidden,” Castiel says, infusing his words with certainty. If she believes, it is so. “Like mine.”

Jo looks doubtful. “How do I find them?”

For a moment, Castiel is at a loss. Manifesting his wings requires no more thought than speaking with Jimmy Novak’s tongue, than walking with his feet. 

Or didn’t, anyway, when he had the power for it.

He brings to mind the memory he drew on when he showed his wings to Jo, the last time he saw her. “Do you remember how they felt? The way they weighed on you?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s how.”

“ _What’s_ how?” Jo asks. Castiel waits. Jo scowls, and then she closes her eyes and fists her hands at her sides. For a moment there is nothing, only Jo’s face twisting in peculiar expressions, but then they unfold before Castiel’s eyes: the wings of a red-tailed hawk. 

Jo looks up. “I found them!”

“Yes,” Castiel agrees. 

“So how do I fly?”

\--

It’s an awkward process, teaching Jo Harvelle how to fly, not least because Castiel has technically never flown himself. Not this way. Still, he has marveled long enough at his father’s creation to understand the general principles. First Jo must learn to will her wings as she wills any other part of her body. Her wings must be as familiar to her as her hands and feet. 

This involves a lot of flapping, the ungainliness of a fledgling testing the air, learning its resistance and its give. Jo beats the air with her wings and squeals when they lift her in short hops across the parking lot. The weathered building beyond them is her parents’ bar, Castiel has learned. The Roadhouse. Dean has spoken of it.

The dreams are not contiguous and not all linearly ordered, for Castiel’s navigational grip is weakening. However, Jo tells him she’s been practicing even when he’s gone. It’s a good thing, he judges. He’s not sure how much longer he’ll be able to come. 

\--

Surely this next time, Jo will finally catch the air, will fly as she yearns to – as Cas yearns for her. But when he finds her next, her eyes are bloodshot from too many tears, her nose red from rubbing. Lying in repose on the floor of her bedroom is the body of Bill Harvelle. It isn’t torn, and there are no bullet holes; her imagination has granted her that mercy. Jo sits on her bed and stares at it.

Castiel meant to avoid this time, these dreams drawn dark and chaotic by Jo’s waking grief, a kind of sorrow with which he has so recently become acquainted. However, his wayfinding has failed him. He sits on the bed next to her. She doesn’t look up. Silently she slides her tear-wet hand into his. He takes firm hold of it, and weakly she squeezes back.

They sit for a while. Finally, Jo asks with hardly a tremor, “Can you fix him?”

“No,” Castiel says. “I’m sorry.” If he could, is Bill Harvelle the person for whom Castiel would exhaust his limited energies? He doubts it. He is grown selfish in his mortality.

Jo nods, unsurprised. A knife lies in her laps, and her thumb strokes the dull edge of the polished iron blade.

\--

Castiel aims for a night six weeks later. He’s off by two months. Jo is distantly pleased to see him; she shows him the same knife she had in the last dream he visited. She explains its history and lists the various monsters Bill Harvelle killed with it.

She doesn’t seem interested in flying, but Castiel is selfish again: he insists. And once she has unfolded her wings and flapped them experimentally, some of her old enthusiasm returns.

They have all night. By the end of it, she is lurching unsteadily through the air, eyes huge with gleeful fear.

Castiel doesn’t tell her goodbye, but when he leaves, he tells her to keep practicing. She promises that she will, and he thinks perhaps she knows.

\--

God has turned his back. Dean wants to.

There isn’t much left of Castiel. 

In a quiet moment, hemmed in by despair on all sides, Castiel returns to Jo. He can no longer afford what little strength it takes to inhabit her dreams. Instead he skims the surfaces of them like a stone skipped across a pond, touching down just long enough for a glimpse here, a vivid image there. She matures in these dreams. She grows taller, less trusting; she grows breasts. Her wings appear less frequently and then not at all: a childhood infatuation, discarded.

In her dreams, she’s still alive. That’s the point. The grief of her father’s death has long since faded, one particularly sorrowful layer of memory among many. She carries his knife everywhere – and many more of them besides, when she goes away to school, pouting but obedient. 

Then, near the present when Castiel’s perspective is pulled sharply askew, he sees them again. He drops into the dream without thought, too surprised for intention.

Jo turns. Her wings flare out behind her, balancing her with ease. “Hey, it’s Dean’s angel friend,” she says, grinning wide. “Man, it’s been years since I used these. Gotta remember how they work.” Her eyes are bright with triumph, with delight; she’s blinding in her brilliance. Her voice drops low and conspiratorial. “Tomorrow we kill the devil. Gotta have wings, going up against an angel, right?”

Castiel chokes. Human weakness haunts him now even in dreams. Human emotion – learned from his vessel, or perhaps merely a sign of the distance he’s fallen – binds him in a grip he can’t break.

“Cas?” 

He is unsteady on his feet. 

“Hey.” Jo pulls at him, and he is powerless to resist. He follows her, and suddenly there a bench behind his knees. He sits, and she cautiously sits beside him, wings flapping for balance. “You okay?” she asks. Maybe it’s because he is crying.

He can’t answer. He clutches his knees to contain the shaking in his shoulders. After a few moments, Jo squeezes his arm. Eventually the shuddering eases, and he can hold himself still. He wipes his eyes with his hands and turns to Jo. “I’ll be better tomorrow,” he promises, which is true for one of them, at least. 

“You better,” she says firmly.

Only half to distract her, he says, “You have very nice wings.” Even now, perhaps he could unfurl his here. He can’t bear to try.

“Thanks,” she says. At her pleasure, they shift minutely, as reflective of her mood as the ears of a cat.

“Where did you get them?” He doesn’t know why he asks. It’s clear enough she doesn’t remember him, which is at it should be, really. The prohibition against temporal paradox is not one he’s ever been ambitious to break.

Jo is looking at him strangely. “You don’t _get_ wings,” she says. “Either you have them or you don’t.”

How grimly true it is. “I would like to see you fly,” he says.

Her grin is immediate, uncontained. “Yeah, okay,” she says. She pats him one last time on the shoulder, making a face – she is not, he thinks, much more experienced at giving comfort than he is at needing it – and then she stands, straight and tall, unbowed by the weight on her back. She walks off a little ways and gives him a cheerful thumbs-up, and then she launches upward, wings beating the air. 

He watches her a little while, soaring on warm drafts of air and diving on folded wings. Then he summons a fragment of what grace he has remaining, and he leaves her there.

\--

It’s a whim, a distraction from Castiel’s fruitless search for his father. He can’t return to the past; what of his grace remains, he dares not spend manifesting his envesseled self in other times. Matter isn’t very portable, temporally speaking, and moving it takes enormous energy. 

Dreams, though. Dreams are only thought pretending to be matter, and past dreams no different than present ones. The cost to one’s grace is minimal. 

Castiel has just failed to find God on the north slope of Alaska. Crude oil pumps down the pipeline, the aurora borealis shimmers in a curtain of greens and pale yellows, and God is not there. Castiel is heart-weary, and the arctic chill teases at his senses, which it could never have done before he began to fall.

So he does it. He discards the pitiless linearity of time. He finds the life of Joanna Beth Harvelle, he pinpoints a dream of hers as easily as he’s ever found one of Dean’s, and he slides into it.

\--

_Jo sets her empty bottle on the table and tosses back a handful of peanuts. When they’re chewed and swallowed, she says, “So, do angels have wings?”_

_“Yes,” Castiel says. Jo peers around his side, eyebrows raised, and he adds, “They don’t naturally manifest in this dimension.”_

_“Ri-i-ight,” she says, though he thinks the doubt is only a matter of form. She gets a faraway look, staring out Bobby’s window. “I always wanted wings. Haven’t thought about it in years, but I used to dream about ‘em, all the time. Dreamed I could fly.”_

-end-


End file.
